In the fall of 1999, a Lear Jet carrying pro golfer Payne Stewart and his entourage lost cabin pressure near Orlando. The plane was cruising on autopilot and the lack of oxygen knocked out everyone onboard.
Bound for Texas, the jet instead flew itself for about four hours toward Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and gave out over South Dakota.
The machine will float on its own momentum until it won’t.
Four hours: An interval whose length was unknowable until the end.
I am slumped at a window seat. The Mississippi flows toward the sea.
People are having sex with chatbots. Some say that it’s a true love, others say it’s only lust.
We have a secret police now. We’re on borrowed time now. Robbing paupers to pay Paul.
The cabin is an ice coffin. I am wearing headphones, the music proof positive there was a civilization and art. We sent gold records into space!
I am listening to TV Eye by the Stooges.
***
Look, it’s summer. We’re six months in. The Wal-Mart ZzzQuil aisle is empty. We’re doing beach reads today. We’re doing Obama’s Summer Playlist.
Since November, I have been on a rock-and-roll bender. It’s been sustaining, and the harder the better.
Hendrix’s Manic Depression. MC5’s Black to Comm. Sleater-Kinney’s The Fox. Everything on Bollocks.
A couple weeks after the release of Nevermind in 1991, Nirvana played a now-famous show in Chicago. Several college friends were there. One was there on acid, and later told me he saw horses charging out of the amps.
This is what I’m talking about.
7 vs. 8 by The Jesus Lizard. Reckless Life by Guns ‘N Roses.
And since I was about 20 years old, for three decades and with no imaginable end in sight, the singular, essentialist magma sounds of the Stooges. The exultant, beautifully unlovely mountaintop where, as was said of Howlin’ Wolf, the soul of man never dies.
What am I doing tonight? I am listening to the Stooges.
What am I doing this weekend? I’m listening to The Complete Fun House Sessions for eight hours.
And next Wednesday? I’ll be spinning Raw Power outtakes for my wife and son on McNeil Family Stooge Night.
Yes, we listen to other bands. We also eat veggies with our red meat.
It’s an unbalanced diet – and we don’t care!
***
A word then for the record sellers, the peddlers and keepers of these hallowed flames.
For Reckless in Chicago, Amoeba in Berkeley and the crowded city-state Music Millennium in Portland. For Shangri-la in Memphis, B-Side in Madison, Landlocked in Bloomington. For every single everyday shop like the one in San Francisco that mailed my records in a used pizza box.
And for our local and listening-area record stores – hello out there Orbit and Ignition, Static Age and Record Farm.
Thank you for taking my money!
I have been wasting my allowance and take-home pay on records, tapes and CDs since 1980 and it’s still a great joy. These stores have always been cultural outposts and oases, carriers of history, contemporaneity, ideas, taste, culture, and good karma. They are still beacons for cool and curious people.
Find me rummaging through the S-es just to see if they’re in there, beckoning another sonic wayfarer into deepest Stoogeland.
Emanations from the Earth’s mantle, passed directly through us and out into the cosmos without limit – Raw Power forever and ever.
Music:
"TV Eye" by the Stooges
"Manic Depression" by Jimi Hendrix
"Down on the Street" by the Stooges
"Pretty Vacant" by Sex Pistols
“Raw Power” by Iggy and the Stooges
